Curious about Curiosity - Page 32

Can anyone confirm that IF Nasa were to find obvious fossils or life, that they'd NOT publish or announce such photos or evidence until after they've consulted with the President or some world body? I find it inconceivable that if they found a fossil they'd just put the photo up. I want to know if NASA is obligated by some secret agreement to keep it a secret until notifying the President or some body of people. Obviously such news would freak out a bunch of people and maybe they'd go hysterical. ha.

It is quite likely that if an obvious fossil were found or moving object it would be supressed initially. However I think that such news would come out sooner if not later. It being the sort of thing that could not be kept under wraps for very long.

Barry diGregorio has some interesting allusions to that kind of scenario in his 2 ebooks, Mars the Living Planet and Microbes on Mars, through interviews or comments by some eminent scientists who consider that their work has been ostracized by SCIENCE (read Gil Levin) because of an unwritten agenda to surpress credible information that points to life being extant on or near Mar's surface.

A challenging trek for MSL ahead, this reminds me of a dried out river bed, lots of stone blocks and layered bedrock. I think MSL will discover something that may rise our eyebrows on its way. Lets hope the hardware will still remains in one piece and the wheels are not falling off as the journey goes on.

I read that the drill is just good for 1.26 cm into rock..ENOUGH about the frigging rocks already....

What about a meter or so hole drilled into
the mars regolith and sampled.

No,,,don't even THINK about telling me the NSL is not equipped for this ,,,not after spending 2.5 million taxpayer dollars,NASA
and you know it..show me the sample at one meter deep.
NOW dammit,,,,47 days into the mission we
need a payday,,,if not then tell us the mission is a failure and we will go back to admiring Oppy...

dx

Posts: 1661

Reply: 630

Posted: September 29, 2012 11:47 PM

...so this is the riverbed NASA is talking about!

yt
dx

Dana Johnson

Posts: 1195

Reply: 631

Posted: September 30, 2012 6:37 AM

Hort, ref 607, 613, and 617, I had two differing responses to my uploading posts, for three days, and they are here. The messages all involved science, facts, links to images from official NASA sites or my error captures that define the 'disappeared' content about water on Vesta and the MSL landing area, with pitted terrain. No personalized content, no outside links. No questionable language and each gave a server response, therefore info transferred. Only after the complaint email was I allowed to post on the 28th Sept.
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This is similar to prior blockages, but one of the errors is new. I cleaned everything here, applied new security, cycled, and reg, generally, defragged. I even installed a new browser and tried to no solution. This was a server selected matter. Similar to many times over many years. Thanks for taking notice.
Without you panoramas we would be blinded by tunnel-vision snapshots.

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Regarding the terrain, we can see a flow path in the panoramas, and other images show pitted areas, elongated craters with rims of rock, but no indication MSL has moved to the pitted terrain linear formation.
A rapid flood path would tend to fill the pits. The pits are a later process?
I observed a folded 'ropey lava' rock in one image here, indicating the terrain is only locally water altered, as appears to be the case.

Why no extensive closeup MAHLI recording?

I see wind erosion accounting for much of the erosion both small and large stones.

Is there a withholding of the conglomerate imaging on sols 53-54?

Mark Wilson

Posts: xxx

Reply: 632

Posted: September 30, 2012 8:07 AM

@post 3062

Interesting rock.

However, it also illustrates the horribly destructive jpg compression NASA have chosen to use. They increased the quality of the BW NAVCAM and HAZCAM images a few weeks ago, but left the colour MASTCAM images unchanged unfortunately. According to Irfanview the NAVCAMS have a jpg quality of 95 and the MASTCAMS 70.

A strange decision really , the only reason I can think of is that while the BW NAVCAM/HAZCAM are engineering cameras the MASTCAMS are "Science" cameras and therefore they don't want the public to access the highest quality data.

Please post comments about the exploration of Glenelg in the new topic.

Mark, I think I am more annoyed with the brightness clipping of the Chemcam images and the JPG Bayer raw CCD images than the low JPG quality of the Mastcam.

I am almost - almost - ashamed for NASA.

I had hoped there would be some realization in this mission that the real science data was already "secure" and that any image data - once vetted by the national security flunky looking for little green men - would be released unencumbered.

Alas, we are dealing with an agency that reports directly to the commander in chief of the Department of War ( the old department names were so much more honest ).

But honestly it's not worth getting upset about, as this is just something interesting to do while I care for my mother in her last days.

I just smile a little smile and see what I can see today through my smeared glasses on Mars.

re: Mark, Winston
My own personal opinion is that the degradation of the mastcam images is not done for scientific reasons. They will release high res images of individual rocks, or areas if there is nothing suspicious in the area. The contrast reduction, and blurring effectively hides the airbrush manipulation of the images. The darkroom terms for what they are doing is dodging, and burning in. They make extensive use of these techniques in the mastcam images. Its relatively easy to spot this in the one hi-res panorama they have released. The blue circles in the image below highlight 2 airbrushed areas. If you go in with a darkening tool and just darken the bright areas you will see that the background has been brightened behind the two white objects. Its actually very sloppy work but nobody believes they would do this so nobody looks very closely. The yellow circle highlights some interesting tracks? The red circle I just found interesting.

Dana Johnson

Posts: 1195

Reply: 637

Posted: September 30, 2012 10:34 AM

ref, Mark Wilson, #623, the panorama is a little like looking at the open ocean waves- stated in humor- I am sure you have noticed the doubled section in the middle. Thought you might do another some day. It is really educational. Repeats here, I had to eliminate the 'white' margins to use my free editor in white balancing, otherwise my image crop looked like your colorized sky. I suspect your original is what the camera sees. That's a great lesson in the proficiency of panorama blending.
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Noticed the 'all rights reserved', but thought this was a valuable correction.

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Horton, #635, I have used C&P to preserve the repeat attempts to post, as there is no other simple way to succeed at posting fairly commonly, however that does not affect the posts. They were always successful until the blockade is formed by the server. This software 'security' process of marsroverblog.com is admitted to by the administrators, so I know it exists. They can reset the problem, as happened again this time, and I understand it is not a mystery to them. We have discussed it many times.
It is the reason many persons no longer post on this blog.
I lost one day plus, 24 hours of 72 total, yet again, making all possible corrections here, for insurance. It was the administrator complaint I made, and their correction that allowed me to post again.
I did have a browser complaint of a google toolbar problem. Based on IE minimized, the browser required closure. Spell check may influence something, but it makes no sense to me. C&P does work here.
Appreciate your interest and efforts.

Dana, there are non-printable formatting information from your word processor in the copy that cause the Movable Type software to fail when you paste. Period. Full Stop.

Try copying your word processing comment into a Notepad document and then copying it from the notepad document into the blog. You will be surprised.

I can assure you that there is no attempt to suppress any discussion in this blog.

The only thing I personally will not tolerate is intolerance - which I will reluctantly delete when it arises.

tbeech, can you provide a link to the original image? Or even just a sol number? I don't recognize it.

You ( and I ) can double check the original data when it is available from the Analyst's Notebook in nine months or so.

Er, what about the circled blue areas looks manipulated? They look to me like two of tens of thousands of rocks I have personally seen over the course of several decades of viewing images from six Martian landers.

Horton,
That image was cropped from the only Hi-res full (almost) panorama released to date. Here is the raw image for the area:
Like I said, the area on top of of both 'rocks' has been brightened. If you darken it you will see the normal background show through. I can show the deception best in greyscale, when I get a chance I will do so. If they are airbrushing these images they are not going to give us unadulterated versions in 9 months. The cover up has been going on for over 35 years. I first started working in darkrooms 4 decades ago, and I started underwater photography 3 decades ago. I spent 2 years island hopping in the indo-pacific area photographing coral reefs and shipwrecks and all of the creatures living in them. I've been studying the images from all 7 US landers for over 20 years. This is the background I see these images through. My website has been online for over 15 years and I've long ago given up on arguing about the images. I can only give my opinion, and try to show what I see.
Tim